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Posted on January 28, 2025February 9, 2025 by Whaling History

Financial Returns From U.S. Whaling Voyages

Barbara L. Coffey
Historic Nantucket,
late Fall 2024, Volume 74, No. 3

Nantucket Historical Association

Download article →

Barbara L. Coffey is a librarian at Monmouth University. Previously, she was a research analyst on Wall Street.

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Ship Spermo Trying With Boats Among Whales On California, 1821, by J. Fisher. Gift of the Friends of the NHA, 2008.31.1

In this article, Barbara L. Coffey draws from the AOWV data and other sources to analyze financial returns from U.S. whaling voyages and calculate the risk premium for the investors who participated in nineteenth-century whaling.

The publication of increasing amounts of data about American whaling has created new opportunities for quantitative analysis of this core nineteenth-century industry. This financial analysis draws from vessel, voyage, and catch data in the American Offshore Whaling Voyages dataset on WhalingHistory.org, supplemented by other sources. Chief among these are the economic reports published in the Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant Transcript (published in New Bedford between 1843 and 1914), which were first scanned and posted online by Mystic Seaport Museum in 2009. In 2013, the Baker Library at Harvard posted scans of Joseph Dias’s New Bedford Whaling Ships, 1783–1906, another of many key resources made available online in the past twenty years.

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